The Law of Innocence Read online

  The meeting that followed the court hearing was more important than a mental health hour. Judge Warfield had signed an order allowing Jennifer Aronson to bring a disc player into the jail for the legal-team conference so that I could view the videos that had finally been turned over by the prosecution.

  I was late to the meeting because it had taken nearly four hours to bus me back from the courthouse to the jail. By the time they put me in the lawyer room, Jennifer and Cisco had been waiting nearly an hour.

  “Sorry, guys,” I said as I was ushered in by a deputy. “I don’t control things around here.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” said Cisco.

  It was the same setup as with the attorney room in the courthouse. They sat across from me. There was a camera that supposedly had no audio feed. The difference here was that I was allowed to use a pen when I was in the room to keep notes or handwrite motions to the court. I was not allowed to take a pen back to my cell because it could be used as a weapon, a pipe, or a source for tattoo ink. In fact, I was allowed a red-ink pen only, because it was considered an undesirable tattoo color should I somehow smuggle it back to my pod.

  “Have you looked at the videos yet?” I asked.

  “Only about ten times while we were waiting,” Cisco said.

  “And?”

  I looked at Jennifer with the question. She was the lawyer.

  “Your recall of what was said and done was excellent,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “Can you stand to watch it again? I want to take notes for the Q and A with Officer Milton.”

  “Do you think that’s the best way to go?” Jennifer asked.

  I looked at her.

  “You mean me asking the guy who arrested me the questions?”

  “Yes. Might look vindictive to the jury.”

  I nodded.

  “It could. But there won’t be a jury.”

  “There will probably be reporters. It will get out to the pool.”

  “Okay, I’m still going to write questions, and we’ll make it a game-time decision. You should write up what you would ask and we’ll compare tomorrow or Wednesday.”

  I was not allowed to touch the computer. Cisco turned the screen toward me. He played the video from Milton’s body cam first. The camera was attached to his uniform at chest height. The footage began with a view of the steering wheel of his car and quickly moved to him exiting the car and moving up the shoulder of the road toward a car I recognized as my Lincoln.

  “Stop it,” I said. “This is bullshit.”

  Cisco hit the stop button.

  “What is bullshit?” Jennifer asked.

  “The video,” I said. “Berg knows what I want and she’s fucking with us even though she made the grand gesture of compliance in court today. I want you to go back to the judge tomorrow with a motion requesting the full video. I want to see where this guy was and what he was doing before I supposedly happened to cross his path. Tell the judge we want to go back half an hour minimum on the body cam. And we want the full video before we go in for the hearing Thursday.”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay, go ahead with what they gave us.”

  Cisco hit the play button again and I watched. There was a time code in the corner of the screen and I immediately started writing down times and notes to go with them. The traffic stop and what happened afterward was pretty much how I remembered it. I saw several places where I thought I could score points questioning Milton, and a few others where I thought I might be able to lead him into a lie trap.

  Where I saw new stuff on the video was when Milton opened the trunk of the Lincoln and looked down to examine Sam Scales for any sign of life. I had been in the back seat of Milton’s patrol car at that point, my view of the trunk limited and from a low angle. Now I was looking at Sam’s body on its side, knees pulled up toward the chest and arms behind his back, secured with several wraps of duct tape. He was overweight and looked as though he was crammed into the trunk.

  I could see bullet wounds in the chest and shoulder areas, and what looked like an entrance wound on the left temple and an exit through the right eye. This wasn’t new to me. We had already gotten crime scene photos in the first batch of discovery from Berg but the video lent a visceral realness to the crime and the crime scene.

  Sam Scales in life deserved no sympathy but in death he looked pitiful. Blood from his wounds had spread across the floor of the trunk and dripped out through a hole created by the bullet that had exited his eye.

  “Oh, shit,” Milton could be heard saying.

  And then he followed his exclamation with a low humming that sounded like a stifled laugh.

  “Play that part again,” I said. “After Milton says ‘Oh, shit.’”

  Cisco replayed the sequence and I listened again to the sound Milton had made. It was almost like he was gloating. I thought it might be useful for a jury to hear.

  “Okay, freeze it,” I said.

  The image on the screen froze. I looked at Sam Scales. I had represented him for several years and through different charges and had somehow liked him even as I privately joined the public in their outrage at the scams he pulled. A weekly newspaper had once labeled him “The Most Hated Man in America” and it wasn’t hyperbole. He was a disaster con artist. Without showing a scintilla of guilt or conscience, he set up websites to take donations for survivors of earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, and school shootings. Wherever there was a tragedy that caught up the rest of the world in horror, Sam Scales was there with the quickly built website, the false testimonials, and the button that said DONATE NOW!

  Though truly believing in the ideal that everybody charged with a crime deserves the best defense possible, even I could not take Sam Scales for very long. It wasn’t that he had refused to pay an agreed-upon fee for the last case I handled for him. The final straw came with the case I didn’t handle—his arrest for soliciting donations to pay for coffins for children killed in a childcare-center massacre in Chicago. Donations poured into a website Scales had built, but as usual, the money went right into his pocket. He called me from jail after his arrest. When I heard the details of the scam, I told Sam our relationship was over. I got a request for his files from a lawyer with the Public Defender’s Office, and that had been the last I had heard about Sam Scales—until he ended up dead in the trunk of my car.

  “Anything unique on the car cam?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Cisco said. “Same stuff, different angle.”

  “Okay, then let’s skip that for now. We’re running out of time. What else was in the latest discovery from Death Row Dana?”

  My attempt to inject a little levity into the discussion fell on deaf ears. The stakes were too high for these two to make jokes. Cisco answered my question in the full-on professional tone that contradicted his look and demeanor.

  “We also got video from the black hole,” he said. “I haven’t had time to go through it all but it will be my priority once I get out of here.”

  The black hole was what regular downtown commuters called the massive underground parking garage located beneath the civic center. It spiraled down into the earth seven levels deep. I had parked there on the day of the Sam Scales murder, giving my driver the day off because I expected to be in trial all day. The prosecution’s theory was that I had abducted Sam Scales the night before, put him in the trunk, and shot him, leaving his body there overnight and the next day while I was in court. To me that theory defied common sense and I was confident I could convince a jury of that. But there was still time between now and the trial for the prosecution to change theories and come up with something better.

  Time of death had been set at approximately twenty-four hours before the body’s discovery by Officer Milton. This also accounted for the leakage under the car that had supposedly alerted Milton and led to the grim discovery of the trunk’s contents. The body was beginning to break down and decompose, and fluids were leaking through the bullet hole in the floor of
the trunk.

  “Any theory on why the prosecution wanted those angles in the garage?” I asked.

  “I think they want to be able to say that nobody tampered with your car all day,” Jennifer said. “And if the camera angles are clear enough to show the dripping of bodily fluids under the car, then they have that too.”

  “We’ll know more when I can get a look,” Cisco added.

  A sudden chill went through me as I thought about how someone had murdered Sam Scales in my car, most likely while it was parked in my garage, and then how I had driven around with the body for a day.

  “Okay, what else?” I asked.

  “This is new,” Cisco said. “We have a witness report from your next-door neighbor, who heard the voices of two men arguing at your house the night before.”

  I shook my head.

  “Didn’t happen,” I said. “Who was it, Mrs. Shogren or that idiot Chasen who lives downhill from me?”

  Cisco looked at the report.

  “Millicent Shogren,” he read. “Couldn’t make out the words. Just angry voices.”

  “Okay, you need to interview her—and don’t scare her,” I said. “Then you talk to Gary Chasen on the other side of the house. He’s always picking up strays in West Hollywood and then they get into arguments. If Millie heard an argument, it was coming from Chasen’s. Since it’s a stepped neighborhood and she’s at the top of the hill, she hears everything.”

  “What about you?” Jennifer asked. “What did you hear?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I told you about that night. I went to bed early and didn’t hear a thing.”

  “And you went to bed alone,” Jennifer confirmed.

  “Unfortunately,” I said. “If I knew I was going to be tagged with a murder, maybe I would have picked up a stray myself.”

  Again, stakes too high. Nobody cracked a smile. But the discussion of what Millie Shogren heard and from where she heard it prompted a question.

  “Millie didn’t tell them she heard the shots, right?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t say it here,” Cisco said.

  “Then make sure you ask her,” I said. “We might be able to turn their witness into ours.”

  Cisco shook his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “No go, boss,” he said. “We also got the ballistics report in the discovery package, and it doesn’t look good.”

  Now I realized why they had been so somber, with me trying to cheer them up instead of the other way around. They had buried the lede and now I was about to hear it.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Okay, well, the one shot that went through the victim’s head and that punctured the floor of the trunk was found on the floor of your garage,” Cisco said. “Along with blood. The slug hit the concrete and flattened, so matching of the rifling was no good. But they did metal-alloy tests and matched it to the other bullets that were in the body. According to what we got in the package, the DNA is still out on the blood but we can assume that will be matched to Sam Scales as well.”

  I nodded. This meant that the state could prove that Sam Scales was murdered in my home’s garage at a time I had confirmed that I was at home. I thought about the legal conclusion I had offered Edgar Quesada the night before. I was now in the same sinking boat. Legally speaking, I was fucked.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “I need to sit with this and think. If you two have no more surprises, then you can get out of this place and I’ll do some strategizing. This doesn’t change anything. It’s still a setup. It’s just a fucking good one and I need to close my eyes and figure things out.”

  “You sure, boss?” Cisco asked.

  “We can work it with you,” Jennifer offered.

  “No, I need to be alone with this,” I said. “You two go.”

  Cisco got up and went to the door, where he knocked hard on the metal with the side of his meaty fist.

  “Same time tomorrow?” Jennifer asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Same time. At some point we have to stop trying to figure out their case and start building ours.”

  The door opened and a deputy collected my colleagues for exit processing. The door was closed and I was left alone. I closed my eyes and waited for them to come get me next. I heard the banging of steel doors and the echoing shouts of caged men. Echoes and iron were the inescapable sounds of my life at Twin Towers.

  7

  Tuesday, December 3

  In the morning I notified the dayroom deputy that I needed to go to the law library to do research on my case. It was ninety minutes before another deputy came to escort me there. The library was just a small room on B level where there were four desks and a wall of shelves containing two copies of the California Penal Code and several volumes containing case law and reported decisions of the state’s supreme court and lower appellate courts. I had checked a handful of the books on my first visit to the library and found them seriously out of date and useless. Everything was on computer these days and updated immediately upon the change of a law or the setting of a precedent. Books on shelves were for show.

  But that was not why I needed the library. I needed to write down my sleepless night’s thoughts on the case and I was allowed to check out and use a pen at the library. Of course, Bishop had long ago offered to rent me a pencil stub that I could surreptitiously use in my cell, but I declined because I knew that before it got to me it would have come into the jail and been passed module to module in a series of visitor and inmate rectums. When not actually using the pencil, I would also be expected to hide it from the hacks in such a manner.

  I chose the law library instead and set to work, writing on the back of the pages of a motion that had already been filed and dismissed.

  What I put together was essentially a to-do list for my investigator and co-counsel. We’d had some setbacks in the early going—no cameras in the lot where I had parked the night of the Redwood party; no cameras that worked, at least, at my across-the-street neighbors’. My own camera on the front deck of my house did not pick up a view of the garage or street below. But I felt that there was still much that could be done to shift things and get momentum going in our favor. First and foremost, we needed to get full-data downloads off my cell phone and car, both of which were currently in police custody. We needed to file motions to examine these and retrieve the data. I knew that a cell phone was the best personal tracker on the planet. In my case, it would show that on the night in question, mine was in my home the entire night. Data off the Lincoln’s navigation system would show that the car was parked in the garage all evening and night and through the estimated time of death of Sam Scales. This, of course, didn’t mean I could not have slipped out in a borrowed car or with a co-conspirator to abduct Sam Scales, but then logic and common sense starts undercutting the state’s case. If I had planned the crime so carefully, why did I then drive around for a day with the body in the trunk?

  The car and phone data would be two powerful points to put in front of a jury and they would also serve to corner the prosecution in regard to opportunity, a key building block of guilt. The prosecution carried the burden of proof and therefore would have to explain how I committed this crime in my own garage when it could not be proven that either my car or I had ever left the property.

  Had I lured Sam Scales to the house and then killed him? Prove it.

  Had I used a different vehicle to secretly leave the house to abduct Sam and then bring him back to place him in the trunk of my own car and then kill him? Prove it.

  These were motions I would need Jennifer to research and write. For Cisco I had a different task. I had initially put him on a survey of my prior cases in search of someone who might want to do me harm: an unhappy client, a snitch, someone I had thrown under the bus at trial. Framing me for a murder was a bit extreme as far as revenge plots go, but I knew that I was being set up by somebody and had to leave no possibility unchecked. Now I would shift Cisco away from that angle of investigation and
turn it over to Lorna Taylor. She knew my cases and my files better than anyone and would know what to look for. She could handle the paper chase while I put Cisco full-time on Sam Scales. I had not represented Scales in years and knew very little about him. I needed Cisco to background him and figure out how and why he was chosen as the victim in the plot to get to me. I needed to know everything Sam had his fingers in. I had no doubt that at the time of his murder, he was either scheming his next con or in the middle of it. Either way, I needed to know the details.

  Part of vetting Sam Scales’s life was to also vet him in death. We had gotten the autopsy report in the very first but thin wave of discovery from the prosecution. It confirmed the obvious, that Scales had died of multiple gunshot wounds. But we had received only the initial autopsy report put together after the examination of the body. It did not include a toxicology report. That usually took two to four weeks to complete following the autopsy. That meant the toxicology results should be in by now and the fact that they had not been included in the latest batch of discovery was suspicious to me. The prosecution might be hiding something and I needed to find out what it was. I also wanted to know what level of mental function Sam Scales was at when he was put into the trunk of my car, presumably alive, and shot.

  This could be handled two ways. Jennifer could simply file a motion seeking the report as part of discovery, or Cisco could go down to the coroner’s office and try to cadge a copy of it on his own. It was, after all, a public record.

  On my to-do list, I assigned the job to Cisco for the simple reason that if he got a copy of the tox report, there was a good chance the prosecution would not be aware that we got it. This was the better strategy. Don’t let the prosecution know what you have and where you are going with it—unless it is required.